Sept 7, 2010 Austin WordPress Meetup — FAQs
Nick Batik lead this post-Labor Day Austin WordPress Meetup lively discussion. Nick took advantage of the light attendance to get hands-on with a number of WordPress Plugins and by the end of night, I think we ended up discussing everyone’s favorite plugins. We crowd sourced our member’s suggestions and came up a list of plugins that your website just flat needs, or solves a very specialized isssue. This was a great opportunity to see how other WordPress practitioners and developers add features to their WordPress websites.
I have included a list of the plugins discussed, with links to wordpress.org to read more about them. All should be available for direct download and installation through your WordPress dashboard or as separate downloads.
We had so many great conversations during the meetup, I’m sure I might have missed suggestions, if you have more information to contribute, please add it to the comments section.
Allow visitors to submit testimonials through a web form.
EG Series
Organize your posts through the creation of groups/series of posts.
Dummy Content
Plugin that creates dummy pages and content to test your site design. It offers the option to auto-delete when you’re ready to launch your live site.
Lorem Ipsum
Generates Lorem Ipsum filler text for both posts and comments. You do need to delete manually when you have real content.
Access Keys for WP Nav Menus
Adds access keys to your navigation menus, making your site more accessible to people who rely on screen readers or other navigation to use your site. (If you have used this, please let me know how well it works!)
All in One SEO
Search Engine Optimizer that allows you to manage your meta tag and other information to improve search engines find and promote your site
Headspace 2
Another recommended SEO manager
Sexy Bookmarks
Sociable
Share & Follow
Three plugins that allow for the addition of social media buttons
CryptX
Encrypts email addresses
WP-PageNav
Plugin that adds additional navigation options to your posts
All in One click updater
Updates all plugins with one click
Bad Behavior
Extra protection from spam comments, on top of Askimet
BackWPup
(note: gives PHP errors until configured)
This plugin does database backups of your site content to email, FTP or other options. It also allows you to do a backup of your media and files, and you can even optimize your database (it puts your site in maintenance mode temporarily so files aren’t corrupted).
WP Touch
An alternate theme plugin to make your site mobile-friendly
Hint: use the User Agent Switcher, a Firefox extension, to switch to mobile device emulator
WPML Multilingual CMS
Allows for localization support, if you have content in multiple languages
Global Translator
Plugin that uses computer translators including Google and Babelfish to translate content into your choice of 48 different languages.
NextGEN Gallery
A powerful and very popular image gallery that will replace your standard media library. A number of plugins have been developed to further extend NextGEN’s functionality.
Also see information on the plugin and information on NextGEN templates from nextgen-gallery.com.
Highslide 4 WordPress *reloaded*
Javascript gallery effects
Members
User/role/content management plugin to add CMS functionality to WordPress
Also see the plugin developer Justin Tadlock’s website.
User access manager
Another user management plugin
Theme my login
Theme my profile
Two plugins to style admin sections of WordPress to better match your custom theme.
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